I cannot forbear allusion to that curious book--little read now--which was published by Southey anonymously, called _The Doctor_:[6] a book showing vast accumulation of out-of-the-way bits of learning--full of quips, and conceits, and oddities; there are traces of Sterne in it and of Rabelais; but there is little trenchant humor of its own. It is a literary jungle; and all its wit sparkles like marsh fire-flies that lead no whither. You may wonder at its erudition; wonder at its spurts of meditative wisdom; wonder at its touches of scholastic cleverness, and its want of any effective coherence, but you wonder more at its waste of power. Yet he had great pride in this book; believed it would be read admiringly long after him; enjoyed vastly a boyish dalliance--if not a lying by-play--with the secret of its authorship; but he was, I think, greatly aggrieved by its want of the brilliant success he had hoped for. But sorrows of a more grievous sort were dawning on him. On the very year before the publication of the first volumes of _The Doctor_, he writes to his old friend, Bedford: “I have been parted from my wife by something worse than death. Forty years she has been the life of my life; and I have left her this day in a lunatic asylum.” But she comes back within a year--quiet, but all beclouded; looking vacantly upon the faces of the household, saddened, and much thinned now. For the oldest boy Herbert is dead years since; and the daughter, Isabel, “the most radiant creature (he says) that I ever beheld, or shall behold”--dead too; his favorite niece, Sara Coleridge, married and gone; his daughter Edith, married and gone; and now that other Edith--his wife--looking with an idle stare around the almost empty house. It was at this juncture, when all but courage seemed taken from him, that Sir Robert Peel wrote, offering the poet a Baronetcy; but he was beyond taking heart from any such toy as this. He must have felt a grim complacency--now that his hair was white and his shoulders bowed by weight of years and toil, and his home so nearly desolate--in refusing the empty bauble which Royalty offered, and in staying--plain Robert Southey. Presently thereafter his wife died; and he, whose life had been such a domestic one, strayed round the house purposeless, like a wheel spinning blindly--off from its axle. Friends, however, took him away with them to Paris; among these friends--that always buoyant and companionable Crabb Robinson, whose diary is so rich in reminiscences of the literary men of these times. Southey’s son Cuthbert went with him, and the poet made a good mock of enjoying the new scenes; plotted great work again--did labor heartily on his return, and two years thereafter committed the indiscretion of marrying again: the loneliness at Keswick was so great. The new mistress he had long known and esteemed; and she (Miss Caroline Bowles) was an excellent, kindly, judicious woman--although a poetess.